How the social network of Hollywood actors evolved over time

This is a short update on previous post, which is a static visualization of relatedness between movies, genres and tags, as seen on IMDB. It’s produced from the same dataset of around 15,000 films, grabbed from IMDB.

It shows the social network of actors and its growth and changes over time.Every movie was analyzed, and a network constructed such that actors that worked together in a movie are connected. This connection also has a time dimension, so from first time when two actors have first seen each other, the network considers them as friends. Of course the actors have their own creative preferences, so they work with other people over time, so they move around the space – at first they are associated with one group, then with another.

The video below shows the animated network, as it evolved from 1960 to 2013. Only actors with more than 100 connections are shown.

It’s interesting to follow Robert De Niro’s associations. He starts off center, moves to center and then separates himself from the majority along with select other actors, which might be some kind of Hollywood elite.

Also note how Christopher’s career flowers and then wanes, as the century comes to a close.

Drop me a note in comments, if you want a bigger or more detailed visualization. This one was made with Gephi and some heavy processing and filtering before that.